Hi all. Tonight our home wireless network went down. It stopped working on all computers, so I figured it was the wireless router. I tried two other routers and found that neither of them worked, either.

I isolated absolutely everything. I turned off all the computers on the network (and the printer), and tried each one individually. I changed the name of the ssids, knowing there are a few iphones that are setup to work with our wireless. At a few points I disconnected the internet cable from the routers as well, in case any kind of problem in the cable could be causing the problem.

It wouldn't work on the nearest computer, which was a laptop about 5 feet away on the same floor. In Vista (laptop has dual Vista/XP) it said the router/access point wasn't responding. In XP it never even got the point where it was attempting to aquire a network address.

Downstairs on one desktop with a USB wireless adapter I could get a connection, and when I tried to ping common addresses (to be sure it wasn't a DNS issue), I'd very rarely get a response, but I would ocassionaly get one. On another desktop with a USB wireless adapter I could never get a connection.

I tried each computer individually, with no other computers/devices on, again with the exception of two iphones, which again were setup to use different ssids. And again, at various points I had no internet connection to the router, and still couldn't get a connection from a compuer to the router. And again, this was a combination of 3 computers and 3 routers.

I changed channels a few times on the router and still didn't have any success. It wasn't until I tried channel 11 that I got things working.

Once I got things working I did a speakeasy speed test, first with a computer that was wired into the network. I got pretty close to normal readings. Here's where it get's really strange. The wireless computers showed readings of up to 260 mb/s, where we're on a connection where 8 is usally pretty good. The wireless computers weren't behaving like they were running terribly fast. They seemed to be a little snappier than normal, but definitely not that fast. So I'm not saying they were really getting 260 mb/s... but somehow they were fooling the speakeasy speedtest into thinking they were.

We haven't gotten any new electrical devices and don't have wireless phones near our wireless frequencies.

It's the strangest thing I've ever seen as far as wireless networks go. All of a sudden, without any changes, the normal channels wouldn't work. I spent 4 hours troubleshooting and figured this is would be the equivalent of hell for IT people.

So anyhow, I'd love to hear some ides for explanations if you have any.